Reading and Learning: Dec. 30, 2014

Tuesday, 30 December, 2014 — development improvement

For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post

This is a longer post, simply because of how much time has passed since the previous entry, largely due to end-of-year holiday preparation and celebrations. I hope you enjoyed your holidays with family and friends as I did.

I’m also splitting out what I read, watched and listened to from technical tool sharpening. These are different concerns on different schedules and just as I want to sustain and improve both sets of practices, I don’t want them unnecessarily coupled. So, here’s articles, podcasts and presentations with technical pieces to follow separately.

Articles read

• “The QA Mindset”, by Michael Lopp
  • Rands goes long in a good piece about companies without dedicated QA teams and what might be missing as a result
• “How Chan-Style Anonymous Culture Shapes #gamergate”, by “A Man In Black”
  • This pseudonymous take on GamerGate is a cogent and plausible explanation of the behavior and motivations of the GamerGate crowd
• “BBEdit Finding”, by Dr. Drang
  • I’ll be using this as a reference into using BBEdit’s find and replace commands more effectively
• “Two little date commands”, by Dr. Drang
• You’re My Favorite Client, by Mike Monteiro
• “Zooming tmux panes”, by Tom Ryder
• “Traveling Ruby”, by Phusion
  • See also the accompanying FAQ
• “From Open (Unlimited) to Minimum Vacation Policy”, by Mathias Meyer
• “Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer, Project Apollo”, by Three Fingered Fox
• “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty”, by Eric Meyer
  • As software engineers and designers, we have a high obligation to think through how what we build may fail, not just in terms of technical failure, but emotional failure.
  • See also Meyer’s follow-up, “Well, That Escalated Quickly”
  • See also Luke Wroblewski’s notes from Meyer’s “Designing for Crisis” talk

Screencasts, podcasts and presentations

• Listened to Let’s Make Mistakes Ep. 140: “Design Tests”
• Listened to Accidental Tech Podcast Ep. 90: “Speculative Abandonware”
• Listened to Ruby Rogues Ep. 181: “RubyInstaller with Luis Lavena”
• Watched segments of Matz’s RubyConf presentation, “Opening Keynote”
• Watched Justin Searl’s RubyConf presentation, “The Social Coding Contract”
• Watched Tom Stuart’s RubyConf presentation, “A Lever for the Mind”
• Listened to Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Ep. 122: “Ruby, the Weird Way (Britt Ballard, Caleb Thompson, Richard Schneeman, Terence Lee)”
• Listened to Back to Work Ep. 195: “Prima Facie Butter Coffee”
• Listened to Accidental Tech Podcast Ep. 91: “Click Agree to Drive”
• Listened to Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Ep. 123: “Don’t Call It a Codecation (Chris Hunt)”
• Listened to Back to Work Ep. 196: “The Circle of Lice”
• Listened to Accidental Tech Podcast Ep. 92: “You Don’t Know My Pants”
• Watched Ruby Tapas, Ep. 18: “Subclassing Array”
• Watched Ruby Tapas, Ep. 19: “Pluggable Selector”
• Listened to Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Ep. 124: “Maintaining Your Legacy (Scott Ford)”
• Listened to Back to Work Ep. 197: “Way of the Brown Lego”
• Listened to Accidental Tech Podcast Ep. 93: “I’m Not Running a Boarding House House Here”
• Listened to Ruby Rogues Ep. 183: “Consequences of Technology with Ben Hammersley”
• Listened to Back to Work Ep. 198: “Gardening Leave”
• Rewatched Erich Smiths’s lightning talk, “Compose with Confidence”